After Apple opened the source code of Swift at the end of last year, Google, Facebook and Uber held a meeting in London to discuss the position of Swift in their respective development strategies. Recently, it was reported in the industry that Google intends to consider Swift as the first language for Android development, and Facebook and Uber also plan to improve Swift's position in the operation.
At present, the first development language of Google Android is Java. Although it is unlikely that Google will replace Java with Swift overnight, with the continuous fermentation of the patent lawsuit with Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Google began to seriously consider Swift's position.
As an open source software under Apache license agreement, Google's reuse of Swift will not destroy the whole Android open source mobile architecture, but will Google really replace Java with Swift?
Since Apple released Swift in WWDC in 20 14, Swift has won many praises for its simplicity and efficiency, including the support of IBM. The applications developed by Swift are leaner and easier to maintain. Many well-known apps, such as Raffles, Pixelmator, Vimeo, etc., have reconstructed their iOS applications with Swift.
However, the migration to Swift is not Google's Ma Pingchuan. Swift cannot be used directly on the Android platform. Google needs to develop a runtime for Swift, which is just the tip of the iceberg. Google also needs to transform all standard code bases to adapt to Swift and support Swift in API and SDK. Some low-level Android API written by C++ can't communicate with Swift for the time being and need to be rewritten, and the top-level APIs written by Java are not immune.
However, it is not impossible to develop Android applications with Swift. Last year, developer Romain Goyet tried to develop Android applications with NDK and Swift of Android, and achieved certain results. So for Google, although it is difficult to migrate to Swift, it mainly depends on Google's will and determination.
In fact, for Google, Swift is not the only Java substitute. Google is also evaluating the new Android and KVM development languages Kotlin. Similar to Swift, Kotlin is an object-oriented language, which emphasizes security. Unlike Swift, Kotlin can be used on Google's IDE platform Android Studio. However, there are also media reports that Google is not satisfied with the compilation speed of Kotlin.
Kotlin's characteristics are close to Java. Compared with Swift, it is much less difficult for Google to migrate to Kotlin, but Google needs to weigh not only the technical problems of the development language itself, but also the game between the development community and the whole ecological environment.
Facebook and Uber have shown great interest in Swift, because Swift can be used as both front-end language and back-end language, and applications and servers can be seamlessly connected, especially for companies like Facebook. Even Facebook employees posted the code base of "porting to Android" on Github. It is not clear whether this is an official act, but what can be confirmed at present is that Facebook is indeed promoting Swift intensively internally, but how the progress is unknown to the outside world.
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